In recent decades, audio production tools have increased in performance and decreased in price. These trends have enabled an increasingly broad range of musicians, both professional and amateur, to use these tools to create music. Unfortunately, these tools are often complex and conceptualized in parameters that are unfamiliar to many users. As a result, potential users may be discouraged from using these tools, or may not use them to their fullest capacity.
As software-based synthesizers have become more advanced, their interfaces have become more complex and therefore harder to use. For example, Apple Inc.'s ES2 synthesizer has 125 controls, mostly consisting of knobs, buttons, and sliders. If those controls were simply binary switches, the control space would consist of 2125 (or 1038) possible combinations. Controls with more settings (e.g., knobs and sliders) allow even more combinations. Fully exploring such a large space of options is difficult. Compounding this problem is the fact that controls often refer to parameters whose meanings are unknown to most (e.g., an “LFO1Asym” parameter on Apple's ES2 synthesizer).
For many musicians, opacity of the controls, combined with a large number of possible combinations translates into an inability to actualize one's ideas. Even for experienced users, the tedium of these interfaces takes the users out of their creative flow state, thereby hampering productivity. Although simpler interfaces exist (e.g., Apple Inc.'s GarageBand), the simplicity of such interfaces is limiting to users. Existing simplified interfaces lack the flexibility of the complex interfaces, resulting in a small timbre palette constructed of a small number of factory presets, templates, and parameters with few creative options. Some manufacturers address this problem by having many, many presets (e.g., Native Instruments Kore Browser). However, searching through a vast number of presets can be a task as daunting as using a complex synthesizer.
The foregoing summary, as well as the following detailed description of certain embodiments of the present invention, will be better understood when read in conjunction with the appended drawings. For the purpose of illustrating the invention, certain embodiments are shown in the drawings. It should be understood, however, that the present invention is not limited to the arrangements and instrumentality shown in the attached drawings.